Thrive: What On Earth Will It Take?

Rating by Paula: 2.5 stars

Synopsis from the official website:

“THRIVE is an unconventional documentary that lifts the veil on what’s REALLY going on in our world by following the money upstream — uncovering the global consolidation of power in nearly every aspect of our lives. Weaving together breakthroughs in science, consciousness and activism, THRIVE offers real solutions, empowering us with unprecedented and bold strategies for reclaiming our lives and our future.”

Thrive is, as far as I know, the most recent in the doomer-conspiracy genre of films, having been released just about six weeks ago on 11/11/2011. I’m not always a big believer in the doomer-conspiracy genre of media. But neither am I a hard core disbeliever. A lot of these projects have some genuine signal among the noise, and Thrive is no exception.

First, the good stuff

Thrive opens with a vignette of quite lovely images demonstrating the beauty and diversity of our planet and its peoples, accompanied by producer/writer/director/narrator Foster Gamble’s voiceover. The images then shift abruptly to atrocious — as in, atrocity — scenes of human suffering.

As the scene shifts, Gamble asks: “What happened? What is happening that could account for the staggering agony and deprivation on this planet?” Gamble’s question launched him on a journey that took him, and takes us, down an unexpected path:

I highlight some of the above as “conspiracies” not to denigrate them but because that is what they are. I have a hard time with UFO stuff personally but if one follows the money, as Gamble does in Thrive, it becomes obvious that a handful of familial dynasties have been reaping unfathomable profits from some very evil activity for a very long time. This isn’t conspiracy “theory,” it’s a matter of public record.

Gamble treats all of these issues from a clear-headed perspective. He does not appear to have delved into his research with a pre-existing idea of what he wanted to prove or disprove, but rather as a scientist would: collect the data, then analyze it to see what it shows. In places Gamble seems positively apologetic that his research would lead him into conspiracies — this is not what he expected, and he wishes he had something different to offer.

Of particular interest to me was his treatment of crop circles. Crop circles have been on my radar for a long time, not from a paranormal perspective, but from that of a designer. I’m a graphic designer and I find crop circles to be just stunningly beautiful. My own theory is that they are the result of a harmonic phenomenon, either natural or man-made, similar to the harmonic disturbance of salt on a flat plane. This would, incidentally, still connect crop circles to the torus, without having to invoke alien entities.

In any event, Gamble’s treatment of this subject matter is thoughtful and well presented. I do think he’s right “on the money” with his analysis of our present human condition.

Unfortunately…

Unfortunately the latter fourth of the film is devoted entirely to Gamble’s Grand Plan For Fixing Everything, complete with the ubiquitous butterfly metaphor, new age muzak, and impossible political goals including ending war, ending human suffering, and shutting down the Fed. And you can get started implementing this fantasy today just by logging onto Gamble’s website.

Few things in this life irritate me more than Grand Plans For Fixing Everything. Without this, I probably would have given Thrive a solid four star rating. So egregious is this film’s call to action that it very nearly undoes all the information in the first three-fourths of the film.

I’ll pose here the same question I always wonder when presented with Grand Plans For Fixing Everything: if nature is capable of producing a fundamental pattern such as the torus, why can’t we just trust that? Why can’t we just simply trust that we are a part of nature, and that tuning in to our own brutally honest assessments of what actually makes us happy is all that is necessary?

Gamble’s criticism of our system is that it is based on fear, and he is absolutely right. But it seems to me that Grand Plans For Fixing Everything are also based on fear — fear of what will happen if things continue going as they are and fear of letting go, of allowing the Universe to unfold in its own way. We simply must control everything, and we are frightened to death of anything beyond our control.

If humans are ever going to live sustainably on this planet, we simply cannot continue thinking that sustainability is something we must engineer. Reintegration will have to be something that comes about on its own terms — it will be the organization that arises from chaos, just as the torus arose from chaos to provide a fundamental pattern of life (and for the organization of matter more generally).

An alternative, not-so-grand plan

If you want to do something, if you really want to fight the system, you have to get utterly and completely radical — find what makes you happy and do it.

I am not talking here about what makes you comfortable. Nor am I talking about what makes you feel safe, what assuages your guilt, what feeds your ego. I’m talking about the sheer unadulterated joy of doing something you probably haven’t even thought of in years.

What did you like to do when you were six years old? Before you learned that boys aren’t supposed to cry and girls aren’t supposed to be good at math? Before you learned that you weren’t tall enough, or pretty enough, or smart enough, or rich enough, or popular enough?

Did you like to sing? Did you like to run and climb trees? Did you like building shapes out of mud, or collecting bugs in a jar? Whatever it was, dredge it up out of your memory banks and commit to doing it again.

The happier you get, the freer you are from the system’s evil clutches. The more joy you have in your everyday life, the less you even give a shit about what the vampire squid is doing. That, my friends, is how to take down the system — if you are invested in the system, whether by fighting it or by participating in it, it retains its power. If you ignore it, it has no power over you. And if a critical mass of people ignore it, it has no more power period. The energy, the harmonics, are shifted into creativity. Like yoga, it doesn’t hurt and if it does, you’re doing it wrong.

If you watch

So if you watch Thrive, I recommend ignoring the last quarter of it or so. Big gigantic socio-politico-economic engineering schemes are definitely not “the answer” or “the solution.” There is no solution. Culture will evolve as it will. But if you understand this much, you can probably skip Thrive altogether.